Wealth Taxation and Household Saving: Evidence from Assessment Discontinuities in Norway

Abstract

I use a quasi-experiment in Norway to examine how households respond to capital taxation. The introduction of a new wealth assessment methodology in 2010 led to geographic discontinuities in household exposure to wealth taxes, along both the extensive and intensive margins. I exploit this novel variation using a boundary discontinuity approach together with third-party reported data on saving behavior. I find that wealth taxation causes households to save more, and that this increase in saving is primarily financed by increased labor earnings. These responses are the combination of small negative effects of increasing the marginal tax rates on wealth and relatively larger positive effects of increasing average tax rates. These results imply that income effects may dominate substitution effects in household responses to rate of return shocks, which has important implications for both optimal capital taxation and macroeconomic modeling.